The fourth quarter was the best time for luxury-home sales in Greenwich last year. It also had the biggest discounts in almost a decade for the tony Connecticut town.

High-end homes that changed hands in the quarter had their prices cut by an average of 13.5 percent, the most since the last three months of 2008, when the housing market all but froze in the months after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, according to a report Thursday by Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate.

The discounts, in a market that's still bloated with lavish homes, helped clear some of the backlog. There were three sales for more than $20 million in the fourth quarter. There was only one earlier last year, and none for all of 2016, the firms said.

"Sellers were unrealistic in their pricing and were chasing the market," Scott Durkin, president of Douglas Elliman, said in an interview. "The real sellers, who wanted to sell, have negotiated down from their asking price."